Survivor S44E03: Sneaky Little Snake

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Survivor has some intrigue but an ultimately boring, typical vote out.
by Jeremy Fogelman

On the latest episode of Survivor, we lose one more player, this time from the Soka tribe and it’s the potentially savvy and interesting player Claire. It’s hard to argue that there was only one real reason that she was voted out, and it’s all because of Jeff Probst -- although I don’t think he did it intentionally.

At the immunity challenge, Jeff notes that Claire is now sitting out challenges for the third time and even praises her ego-less response. And perhaps if her tribe had won, there’d be no issues about that little aside -- but maybe the tribe hadn’t realized the situation with Claire yet. How could they avoid knowing it when Probst mentions it though?

Again, this isn’t me saying Jeff wanted Claire out, I think he just wants an interesting and entertaining game for the audience at home and a fulfilling experience for the players, but that little aside, so similar to many he’s made over the years, had an accidental domino effect. Claire seemed to only really have one major ally in Frannie, but she was voted out by everyone (except Matt who still had lost his vote because of the Isle of Challenges).

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In Survivor there’s always been the concern about the weak challenge players, and often a particularly poor challenge can make someone an easy target. Here you have a situation with Claire simply not participating in three challenges in a row, but that becomes noteworthy -- I mean could she have helped them win by being in them? Who knows? They don’t really, as Frannie notes in the tribal council.

But an easy target is an easy target, and Danny wanted the heat off of him -- Heidi was allied with him already, and with the Claire versus Josh situation rising up, you had an easy situation where it was already three votes against Claire. Since Matt had no votes, and the tribe (except for Danny) incorrectly thought he had an idol, he and Frannie were safe enough -- but no capability to vote in a bloc. So sadly we see Claire voted out, a victim of timing and circumstances and old school Survivor thinking.

At least we did get some fun potential stuff, with Danny really playing up the villain angle and tricking Matt into finding his fake idol and then telling everyone he has a real one! Could blow up in his face, but it’s a sinister and effective move for now. In contrast on Ratu, Matthew is already in an alliance with Jaime, but is perfectly okay with his ally finding his fake idol too -- better safe than sorry about the future.

Those moments were fun enough, and the challenge was okay, I’m just a little bored of the “weak player vote” justification, which I don't really think has any real bearing historically on actual wins, because usually those losing tribes are already losing or have simply had bad luck. At this point it’s actually completely even, aside from the Bruce evac, every tribe has lost exactly once -- so I don’t buy the justification, even if I can understand why they might.

So it’s a bit of a disappointing episode in the end.